The United States currently has the world's largest postal system, which handles billions of pieces of mail each year. The servicing of mail delivery involves three general steps: collection, sorting, and delivery. Collection takes place through a series of local post office facilities and Bulk Mail Entry Units (BMEU) spread throughout the United States. The mail is then sent from local post offices or BMEUs to central facilities known as sectional centers. At the sectional centers, high speed automated equipment sorts the large volumes of mail based on the destination post office or zip code for delivery.
Recently, the postal system has been used as a weapon of terror and fear by the inclusion of harmful chemical or biological contaminants, such as, for example, the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis (anthrax), within or on a mailpiece. Such contaminants can be carried in several forms, including for example, a powder form. The harmful effects of only a few contaminated mailpieces can be far reaching, as cross-contamination of other mailpieces can easily occur when the mailpieces come in contact with each other or are passed through the same machines during sorting.
Ideally, it would be desirous for the postal authority to examine and/or test each piece of mail individually for any possible contamination before it enters the mail system, thereby isolating any contaminated mailpieces and preventing any cross-contamination. With the large volume of mail processed daily, however, such an approach is not feasible due to the time and cost that such an undertaking would entail.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and system that allows large volumes of mailpieces to be tested for any possible biohazard contaminants in a relatively short time and in a manner similar to existing to mail handling.